


like you never really loved the pain.

by lovelyorbent



Series: character studies. [4]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Child Neglect, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Constipation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Hansen Family Feels, Headcanon, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Incest, Spiders, The Drift (Pacific Rim), Travel, neurodivergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 22:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3827644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there are spiders crawling up his arms and a crowd of hundred packed tight into his skull and a smile on his face and scott hansen went mad a long time before he was discharged, but no one ever fucking noticed.</p><p>(no one who ever said anything, anyhow.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	like you never really loved the pain.

**Author's Note:**

> i was getting a bit sick of all of the portrayals of scott as 'uncle rapey mcbadtouch' because i personally feel that while categorizing a character as either good or bad may be convenient for the purposes of a storyline, no one is really one or the other, and it's way more interesting if every character is human.
> 
> so, like, what i was trying to do with this was portray every single character as somewhat morally grey or hard to pass judgement on. in the form of a scott character study.
> 
> except angela, because she's my little ray of sunshine.
> 
> enjoy.
> 
> p.s.: there's no actual incest that takes place, it's just vaguely discussed. if that squicks you, here's your warning. if you're disappointed, well, know that i'm sorry
> 
> title from the song 'barricade', by stars.

Scott Hansen is an accident.

And he figures, if he started out as a mistake, he might as well make a few, since he’s been given the chance.

 

Theresa Hansen is seventeen when her eldest son is born.  She’s twenty-one when Scott is, and her first prenatal doctor’s visit is about two hours before “prenatal” becomes regular old “natal”.

He presents transverse and they end up putting his mother under and giving her a C-section, which means that she’s out cold when his father puts the name on the birth certificate, which is the only reason he escapes being Achilles Hansen.

Scott Lachlan Hansen.

He gets out a hell of a lot easier than _Hercules_.

 

Scott doesn’t exactly remember his first memory.  More accurately, he isn’t sure which memory of Tess and Donovan fighting is the first one.

Because they always are—he’s fifteen years older than her and feels like he’s being trapped with the two kids she says are his and she’s fifteen years younger than him and feels like he’s stolen her youth and they both fuck around on the side a lot and Donovan drinks too much and Tess throws things when she’s angry and all in all, they’re probably miserable together, even though they’re very occasionally the picture of marital bliss.

Scott’s first word—at the age of _four_ , which would be a red flag for other parents, probably, but not his—is _whore_.

It makes Tess cry and Donovan laugh and Herc, who is eight, ball his fists up and walk out of the room.

 

When he gets sick, Tess sits by the side of his bed and hums.

She’s tone-deaf and her hand is sticky with spilled decongestant when it strokes through his hair and she gets impatient with his whining after a while and tells him to shut up, but she tries.  She’s twenty-six and she’s trying to be a mother for once because he needs her but she doesn’t know how.

But it’s about the gentlest touch he ever gets from her, so he loves it.

 

Scott wakes up with sunlight pouring through the window and a wolf spider the size of his hand crawling up the wall a breath from his face and tumbles out of his bed, only not hurting himself because at six he’s all skinny, elastic limbs, indestructible in childhood.

His brother shoots upright in the bed across the room at the crash, but when Scott tries to crawl into bed with him, Herc shoves him off, and he knows better than to go to his parents, so he just sits on the floor against the leg of Herc’s bed and watches the spider suspiciously as it makes its way up the wall.

By the time Herc wakes up enough to realize he’s on the floor and asks him what the fuck he’s doing on the floor, he’s been talking to it for the last two hours.

Its name is Ernie.

 

Donovan teaches Herc to smoke while Scott is sitting on the couch, watching the two of them as his brother inhales a lungful of smoke and coughs and their father laughs at him.

Scott laughs too, although he doesn’t know what’s funny about the way Herc’s eyes are watering and his hand is stubbing the cigarette out almost violently.

 

“Remember that time you dropped me off the couch,” Scott says, and Herc squints at him across the table.

“ _You_ don’t remember that.”

“Yes, I do. We were over there and you dropped me off the couch.  I was wearing a green shirt and you tried to pick me back up before Mum noticed, but she did.”

“How fucking old were you?” Herc asks, pointing his spoon at him.

“Three,” Scott replies.

“Nobody remembers being three,” his older brother says, with all the confidence of a twelve-year-old who has seen just enough of the world to think he’s seen it all.

“I do,” Scott says firmly.

And he does.

Herc insists it’s not normal, but he does anyway.

 

He finds a weird bug crawling on a brick wall on the way home from school and follows it for three blocks as it makes its steady way down the road, crouching down on the sidewalk and hopping every so often as it moves.

It’s slow going and he scrapes both his knees up when he doesn’t pay close enough attention to balancing.

But there’s something fascinating about it.

 

Tess Hansen, even when she’s not screaming like a fucking shrew, is not even pretty. Scott doesn’t have any idea why his father married her, other than that she was pregnant with Herc. She’s short and round and has freckly pink cheeks and stick-straight, carroty hair.

Then again, Donovan Hansen doesn’t really have much going for him, either.  He’s almost fifty and his dark red hair is going grey—not silver or white—and he’s growing a beer belly even though the rest of him is skeletally skinny, cheekbones cut sharply into his face giving him a cruel affect.

He doesn’t get it.

When he asks them—individually—why they got married, his father laughs in his face, breath smelling like the cheap beer he’s holding in his hand.  “Big tits,” he says, and Scott resists gagging, because that’s his _mother_.

“Didn’t have anywhere _else_ to go when I got pregnant,” Tess tells him.

Later that evening he catches them kissing in the kitchen, almost sweetly, Tess with a salt shaker in her hand that he knows she was probably going to launch at his father’s head before he caught her by the waist, Donovan with his arms around her and a beer can spilling its contents onto the floor at their feet.

“Do they love each other?” he asks Herc, because he wants to know.

Herc puts his pillow over his head and tunes him the fuck out.

 

When he’s eleven he breaks both legs falling off the wall by the school, and Herc barely even reacts, just takes a look at his legs twisted at all the wrong angles and crouches down next to him, says, “Wait here a mo’, Scotty,” and sprints away. Scott is trying not to cry because _boys don’t_ , says his mother, but it’s hard, and by the time Herc comes back to sit next to him and wait for the doctor’s he’s red-faced and shaking with the effort.

And his brother just sits there silently with him and waits.

Boys don’t hug each other, either.

It takes half an hour before they’re picked up, because the nearest hospital is a ways away, and in that time Scott gets used to the pain, as much as you can get used to the worst thing you’ve ever felt.

“He was proper brave,” Herc tells Donovan when he comes to pick them up, and Scott can feel his chest swelling with pride.

 

There have been Hansens in Australia since it was a penal colony, a bunch of Scotch-Irish bastards who came over on one of the very first boats, pissed as hell at the English. Half of them pretend they’re still Scottish or Irish and the other half have the names to prove it.

Donovan tells them their criminal ancestor was a murderer with something of ancient mystery about the words. Their uncle claims he was a rapist like he is somehow proud of that.  Their grandfather says highwayman.  Tess looks up the records and finds out that the transportable offense of one William Donald Hannesen, at the age of nine, was the theft of a black lace bonnet.

Her laughter does not endear her to her in-laws.

 

Neither of their parents, for all the ways in which they are deficient, ever hit either of them.

Donovan comes close, once, when Scott is twelve and keeps asking him questions he knows his father doesn’t know the answer to.  He’s just drunk enough that he raises his arm to backhand him, but before Scott even realizes what’s happening, his brother has caught Donovan’s hand midair, is holding him by the wrist so tightly his knuckles are white and their father cries out.

At sixteen, Herc is skinny and tall, almost as tall as Donovan, and already filled out with enough wiry muscle to nearly drive their father to his knees with just the grip on one wrist. “That’s your fucking son, Donnie,” he growls, and even though his voice cracks, teenaged, it’s flat and deadly. “You gonna hit your fucking son?”

He’s standing between the two of them now, blocking his father’s view of his younger brother like it’s himself he’s talking about, like it’s a challenge, and Donovan doesn’t hit either of them, just wrenches his wrist away and collapses onto the couch.

 

Scott’s no good at math.

You can’t _memorize_ math, you have to _understand_ it, so Scott’s no good at it.

He’s also no good at English, or at least he doesn’t test well at it, for the same reason. He can spell everything and all, and speak proper, but he can’t write a fucking essay to save his life.

He kicks ass at history, though.

It’s kind of useless, but it’s something.

 

Sometimes, Scott pretends to like people so they’ll like him.

What none of them know is that, really, he prefers to be alone.

 

Herc shows him how to skip stones across the river and they never make it to the other bank.

 

When his brother is almost seventeen, Angela Kelly asks him out on a date.

Scott knows her vaguely as the pretty girl who works at the Coles’ down the street, freckles all over her nose and a fall of strawberry blonde hair curling over her left shoulder. And sure, he’s thirteen and has never been on a date, but he’s going to go right ahead and take the piss out of Herc because he got asked out by a girl, _like a girl_.  The teasing loses its amusement value much faster than he’d like, though, because Herc doesn’t seem to be in the slightest embarrassed by it.

In fact, the only thing he does in return is give Scott a pitying look before he shrugs his jacket on and sneaks out.   “Don’t tell Donovan,” is all he says.

 

Scott is running a spider idly through his fingers when his brother comes home from his date, watching its hairy legs move as it crawls over his hands.  “That’s fucking disgusting,” Herc informs him as he’s tossing his jacket onto the bed.

“Naw, it’s bonzer,” Scott replies, and flings the spider, which is the size of a dollar coin, at him, grinning.

Herc trips backwards onto his bed trying to avoid it and kills it with a hand,  swearing as he does.

“Aw,” Scott says, watching him.  “You killed ‘im.”

“You’re fucking next.”

 

Scott gets in a fight with a kid at school for no reason at all, just because, and when Herc passes it in the hallway, he doesn’t jump in, just joins the circle of people watching, arms crossed, face stony.

He’s got the start of a black eye and the other boy’s sporting a bloody nose, and they’ve both been scared off a little by the hits and are barely touching each other, more dancing than fighting.  When he circles around Herc’s side of the onlookers, he hears that familiar voice say, softly, “When you have a shot, Scotty, you _take it_.”

The next time the boy swings, Scott ducks under it and head-butts him right in the chin, then hooks his feet out from under him as he staggers back, toppling him, dazed, to the ground.

Then walks to his class as the circle breaks apart.

 

Herc enlists with the RAAF the second he turns eighteen and ships off two weeks after he graduates. “Fuck this town,” he tells Scott as he’s packing what little he has to pack.  “’m not staying here until I turn into Donovan.”

Deniliquin is too small for Hercules Hansen and it always will be.

That’s about when Scott realizes it’s too small for him, too.

Later that evening he walks in on Herc in their room with his hand down Angela’s panties and stands there frozen and horrified for a few seconds until Angela opens her eyes from where they’re screwed shut, head tossed against the pillow, and gasps. “Oh! Herc!”

Herc doesn’t seem to recognize that as a sign of distress until she smacks his hands away and yanks the pillow she’s lying on out to cover herself.  “Fucking Christ,” he exclaims, pulling back and scrambling to hide the way his trousers are tented, and Scott manages to unknot his muscles and scurry off, slamming the door behind him.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” his brother tells him the next morning, walking past him where he’s been unable to get to sleep on the couch, and then he exits the house to make the trek towards the train station.

When Scott reenters the room, Angela’s gone and Herc’s side is bare and clean.

 

He gets one letter from Herc. It says:

_Sergeant’s a cunt.  You’d love him._

_HH_

 

Tess sends him to the Coles’ for groceries late in July even though she’s a terrible cook and Donovan isn’t better, and he makes sure to hit Angela’s register, grin widely at her as she blushes.

She holds her head high, though, nose tipped up and eyes approximating Herc’s very own poker face.

 

He hits fifteen and six feet tall that year, 1999, gangly and barely proportionate, too thin and not muscled enough, so he takes up running.

 

Herc comes home for three days after basic training before he has to stand active duty, looking like he was born in a uniform, shoulders having broadened to fill it out, khakis tucked into his boots and dog tags swinging from his neck.

Tess says, _There’s my boy_ and kisses his forehead and half an hour later she’s back to screaming at her husband.

Donovan doesn’t say anything at all.

Herc dumps his go-bag onto the bed and shoves his hand into Scott’s hair to knock his head backwards, says, “How’s it, creep?”

Angela’s at university, so Herc has to spend most of his three days with his little brother, and that suits Scott just fine.  Because maybe he doesn’t like people as much as he pretends to, but he wants his older brother to think he’s cool more than mostly anything.

 

In November of 1999 Scott gets drunk with his mates and fucks a girl for the first time. For two weeks, rumours circulate that he’s gone and got her up the duff, and he spends the whole two weeks wondering, horrified, if it’s true, because neither of them had known how to use the fucking condom.

He swears to God he’ll go to church and say some fucking prayers or something if it’s not true.

It’s not true.

He does neither of those things.

 

Scott barely scrapes the grades to pass through school.  Probably he drinks too much, but everybody’s doing it, right?  Fucks his way through every girl in the school who’ll have him.

It’s not like his parents give a damn.

 

Sometimes, Donovan says something like _Fucking soft in the head_ and Scott remembers every time he’s ever said something like that.  Same with _useless_ and _fucking pain in my ass_.

He can list the memories by date.

Remember everything about them—what he was wearing; how the words felt when they stuck in his chest; the precise expression on Donovan’s face and the exact tone of his voice.

He drinks to forget, sometimes, because he can’t, otherwise.

But it’s temporary.

 

Morbidly, Scott wants to pull the legs off the roach he’s got trapped against his desk at school. Not because he really wants to hurt it, he just wonders what it would be like.

He doesn’t do it, though, because he’s not _psychotic_.

 

The next time Herc comes home on leave, Scott’s an inch taller than him.  Scott calls him “little brother” for the whole week, until Herc jovially challenges him to a race and he accepts.

Herc lets him win by half a second, and while he’s crowing, shoves him into the river and leaves him there, jogging through the town on what is either a cooldown or a victory lap.

Scott drags himself home soaking wet and dumps all his clothes on Herc’s bed before he goes to take a shower.

 

Neither of them ever get broad.

They don’t have the genes for it—Donovan’s whole family, all the Hansens, are tall and lean, and while neither of them have ever met Tess’ family, it’s sort of clear that her traits lost out, because she’s the shortest in the house by almost a whole foot. No, Herc’s strong, but he’s wiry. And Scott, when he starts putting effort into being strong, gets wiry too.

Wakes up when morning when he’s seventeen and finds himself with a brightly-stubbled jaw and dark red hair covering his chest, leading down into his waistband, and wonders when exactly he started looking like a man instead of a gangly little kid.

He shaves with a straight razor because it’s what they have, and skips his upper lip until he’s got a proper mustache.

Tess says, “You look ridiculous,” and Donovan says,

“You look fucking ridiculous,” but Scott figures what do they know.

 

The night before the first day of his last year at school he sneaks out the window and grabs some mates and they all run out into the redgums and find a clearing to make a campfire in and go to school hungover as fuck on three stolen bottles of vodka.

 

He sees Angela on break working at Cole’s during her winter break and stops in to say hi. She’s cut her hair so it’s barely down to her ears and her freckles are sitting under a tan.  She looks good, and for a moment, Scott thinks with some satisfaction to himself that he and Herc really do have similar types. Bit short, but then a lot of girls are a bit short to a man who’s 6’2”.

“How’s Sydney, then?” he asks as he’s paying for his food.

“Can’t believe I’m graduating in half a year!” she replies, and her tone really is incredulous. “How’s school?”

“Ah, failed an algebra test yesterday, but got a girlfriend.”  Both of those things are lies.  He skipped the test yesterday and he hasn’t had a date proper for a couple of months.   “How’s the digger?”

“What, doesn’t he write you?” she asks, eyebrows lifting and lips pursed and really, she’s gorgeous.

“If he does the old man’s not bringing me my post.”

Angela frowns, but then, as far as he knows, she’s never met Donovan.

 

He sends his brother a letter on his eighteenth birthday.  It says:

_Guess who’s not enlisting, cuntface?_

_SOMEBODY’S got to make Dad proud._

_Scott_

He’s not sure who “somebody” is, because for damn sure it’s not him, but it’s a jab at something he knows is one of many of Herc’s sore places about Donovan.  And that’s what little brothers do, isn’t it? Bite where it hurts.

He doesn’t get a letter back.

“Yeah, love, jus’ like that,” he tells the girl he’s fucking who is clawing down his back, whispers it into her skin and feels her shudder.  It’s probably faked, and he should probably care, but he doesn’t, really, because if she’s not going to tell him he’s not doing it right he doesn’t expect himself to be a mind reader.

Her older brother comes home halfway through, drunk off his arse, and the whole affair ends in screaming and the brother taking a swing and falling over because his balance is off.

Scott sees his opening and swipes his clothes, runs down the drive buck-ass nude and climbs into the trousers as he rounds the corner.

It’s starting to get fucking cold.

 

Scott steals a pack of Donovan’s cigarettes and starts smoking, too, and he’s halfway through it before he realizes, sitting on the back porch with a fag dangling from his fingers, that with all the drinking and smoking and fucking he’s doing, he’s probably growing up to be just like his old man.

He manages, somehow, to convince himself that’s not a bad thing.

 

When Scott’s almost nineteen Herc comes home on leave in November, and Angela, who is home on break, throws herself into his arms at the head of the drive, kisses him hard enough to knock him back against the fencepost, which collapses unceremoniously under them and topples them, shouting, to the ground.

Scott, who is watching from the window, laughs until he almost pisses himself.

Donovan and Tess are less amused.

They didn’t know Angela existed.

 

Herc doesn’t really come home, that leave.  He only gets as far as his father yelling at him in the drive, Angela standing by his side, fingers laced through his.

Donovan’s drunk, and Scott guesses some part of him objects to his son, who is _twenty_ , fuck’s sake, keeping this from him.  As if he’s ever encouraged confidence.  Maybe it’s something to do with the military service, which he doesn’t approve of either.  Maybe it’s something to do with Angela specifically.  Maybe it’s the kiss, how public it is, when he barely kisses his wife in private, let alone in public.  Maybe it’s the fence post.  Maybe it’s just that he doesn’t get along with Herc and hasn’t since the time Herc was able to overpower him.

Whatever it is, escalates.

Thing is, when the word _whore_ drops out of their father’s lips, Herc pulls his hand out of his girlfriend’s and breaks his nose so fast Scott almost doesn’t register it until Donovan is dropping to his knees, yelling, and his brother is wrapping his hand, bruised-knuckled, around his girlfriend’s waist, and tugging her away from the house, even though she’s trying to go to the man on the ground.

Angie’s a nice girl. Herc, who is not a nice boy, is lucky to have her.

Tess tells her husband, snidely, later that night, “You deserved it.”

Scott is the only thing that keeps Donovan from breaking _her_ nose, getting in between them the way Herc had done, once, for him, holding the old man’s skinny arms back from his mother.

 

Angela knocks on his window in the middle of the night two months later, and if he’d been asleep, he’d be more concerned, but instead he’s chasing a beetle around a piece of paper with a pencil, doing nothing.

“Fuck, what the hell,” he says as he’s opening it to let her climb in, and she sits down on the bed that used to be Herc’s, knees together, face pale, lips pressed together in a thin line.  “What’s going on?”

“I’m pregnant,” she tells him. And fuck, what’s he supposed to do with that?  He just stares. “I don’t know what to do,” she continues.  “I don’t know if I should tell him or just—”

She waves her hand, vaguely, and he gets it.  It’s what he would do if he were her, probably, get rid of it.  “Angie,” Scott says, trying to be the adult he isn’t really. “You know he’d want to know.”

“He keeps saying he’s not going to do it the way your parents did,” she whispers, sounding like she’s about to start crying.  And he has no idea what to do with a crying girl, so he waves his hands like he’s saying _nonononodon’tworry_ and feels the awkwardness settle in on him.  “I don’t want to make him do anything he doesn’t want—”

“Look, but you’re different from Mum and Dad,” Scott flounders, because even though Herc started calling them _Tess_ and _Donovan_ a long time ago, he can’t quite bring himself to let go of that relation.

“What is he going to say,” she says, and yeah, she’s crying a little.  “I’m _twenty-three_ , I wasn’t supposed to—not by mistake—”

“Shut up,” Scott orders her, because he’s no good at this, but she obeys, pale-lipped. “Tell him, not me. But you know he’ll do it proper, all right?  I can’t do shit.” He holds up his hands. “Don’t know why you came here.”

He’s not a nice boy, either.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she murmurs, calmer now, and sounds a little like Tess, enough that Scott winces.

“Well, go fucking tell _him_!” Scott says, waving his hands. “Write a letter.”

 

Herc kidnaps him from the street less than a month later and tosses him into a beat-up Jeep driven by someone else in uniform, and as Scott is protesting Herc claps a hand over his mouth and says, “We need a witness.  And she was right, that mustache is awful.”

“Why can’t this bloke do it?” Scott tries to ask around his hand, gesturing to the driver.

“Because god knows why, but Angie wanted you there.”

The first few hours of the seven-hour drive to Sydney mostly consists of Scott replaying _god knows why_ in his head, hurt and pretending not to be.

 

The wedding takes about fifteen minutes, total.

After that, Herc kisses his wife so hard he bends her backwards just a little and whispers something in her ear that Scott doesn’t catch.  He does catch Angela’s reply, though:  “No chance. I’m hyphenating.”

Then they leave, and his brother gives him some money for a bus back, but Scott just—pockets it. Walks around Sydney for a while. He’s never been, even though it’s not so far away, in the grand scheme of things.

Decides he’s not going back.

 

He calls home the next day to tell them not to send out a missing persons report.  Donovan says, “A what?”

 

He doesn’t tell Herc he hasn’t gone home, because he knows just what he’d say, but then he’d probably let him crash on the couch of wherever he’s living, if he’s not shipped out. And he doesn’t really want to be anywhere near the bedroom of a married couple that isn’t his parents, because he’s pretty sure the last time _they_ fucked was before his birth.

Or at least he wouldn’t be surprised, given how Donovan always seems to chase younger tails than his wife, who has just hit forty and looks it.

 

He avoids the publishing company Angela works with, because he knows she must at least be around that building at some point.  In a fire of self-sufficiency, he applies for as many jobs as he can get to in the first few days, sleeps in parks and on beaches and buys shit food with the money Herc gave him to get home.

A week in, he gives up and waits for Angela by her office in the clothes he’s been wearing since he got here, and he’s rank and probably dirty and looks like shite and he’s hungry and thirsty and embarrassed, but she just says, “Oh, Scott,” calls in late, and brings him home.

Lets him crash on the couch.

Doesn’t tell him to go back.

 

(There are baby books in the bedroom, Scott discovers when he’s looking for the washing machine. Things with stupid names like _Baby And You_ and _What To Expect When You’re Expecting_. He wonders, a little, which one of them bought them.  If they bought them together.  Where Herc is.

He finds a sticky note with _Love you.  Be back before you know it._ scrawled on it in his brother’s handwriting tacked to the fridge, and guesses he’s probably run off somewhere again.

It’s disgusting, really, how cute that note is.

Except he can’t summon any real revulsion.)

 

Angela lets him sleep on her couch for two months before she says anything about him leaving. “Herc’s going to go try and get you at home when he comes back on leave in a few months,” she says, and that’s when he realizes she hasn’t told his brother that he’s here. “You might want to tell him where you are.”

She’s started wearing loose shirts, the kind that gather under the breasts and conceal the stomach. Herc’s rings sit on her finger, gold and green.

“Yeah,” he says, and then doesn’t.

She’s sort of a saint, his sister-in-law.

Sort of an angel.

 

He doesn’t get a job.

It’s not that he’s opposed, he just doesn’t really have any skills.  He dropped out of high school a month early by virtue of just fucking leaving, and since no one’s come after him he assumes the paperwork happened, somehow. But Angela starts looking worried at the bills in the mail and he figures he ought to stop leeching, because Herc will beat his ass if he comes home and finds out he’s been taking advantage of Angie being nice, so he leaves the house one morning while she’s at work and doesn’t come back.

He’s always been flighty.

 

He starts sleeping on benches again.  He’s got more than one set of clothes now, so he can afford to wash them, and he gets pretty damn good at stealing, but some cop eventually recognizes him—Angie’d filed a missing persons’ even though his parents had never bothered—and drags him down to the station to see her.

She almost clocks him when she gets in, but not quite.  She does, however, yell at him so loudly and with such profanity that an officer actually has to come down and ask her to keep it down.

“Don’t you _dare_ do that to me again, Scott Hansen,” she snarls when the man leaves again.  “I will cram my foot so far up your arse you’ll be _shitting stilettos_.”

And that’s about when he finally realizes why this girl married his brother.

 

Angela phones down to one of her girlfriends on the drive home, who’s bartending downtown, and gets Scott a job as a barback.  Then she sits him down on her couch, practically throws her purse down the hall, and leaves her work shoes on, presumably to make him think about the stiletto threat.

“Listen to me very carefully,” she starts, and then spells out her words so clearly he forgets she’s six months pregnant and not at all menacing.  “I told Herc you were _missing_ and he’s been trying to get leave for the last month.  Do you have any _idea_ how much trouble you’ve caused? Do you know how bad stress is for babies?” She throws a pillow at his head. “Go to your room.”

He stares at her, because he’s sitting on his room, pretty much, and lies down, holds up his hands as if to say _what do you want_ , and then, when she huffs, annoyed, he says, “Already gearing up to be a mum, huh?”

“My son is going to be _so_ much better behaved than the both of you put together.”

 

Herc straight-up cold-cocks him when he gets home.  He’s not really expecting anything less, but after he lands on his ass on the floor with an aching jaw, there’s his brother’s hand right there to help him back up.

He doesn’t know if he trusts it, but he takes it anyway.

“D’you know how much you worried Angie?”

“Call me aware. Ow, you _fucker_.”

 

He’s in the middle of moving out to a shitty apartment across the city when Herc gets buzzed that his wife’s in labour and they’re driving her to the hospital.  He drops Scott’s bag dead in the stairwell and dashes out the door to the shitty car, almost drives off before Scott gets there. By the time they get to the hospital he’s only barely concealing his jitters under the steady poker face he’s been building for years.

The delivery’s rough and long and Angie’s barely lucid for half of it, but Charles Michael Hansen happens to the world at around ten that night. Herc waits for Angie to wake up before he writes the name on the papers, but he keeps his son in his arms as long as they’ll let him, whispering something Scott knows he’s not supposed to hear.

( _Oh my god_ , he’s saying, _oh my god.  My son. Look at my son_.)

 

Herc tries to get himself transferred home, and he doesn’t quite manage it. Winds up with another couple of years away, so he kisses his wife and his son goodbye and drags Scott up by the collar of his shirt and says, “You hurt her again and I’ll have your fucking head. Take care of them.”

It’s all the goodbye he gets, and he tries not to be bitter about that.

 

He’s good at being a barback because it’s fucking easy.  He’s really bad, though, at not hitting on Angie’s friend, Laurie, who is _technically_ his boss.

She’s hot and he’s twenty and fuck, why not?

She serenely steps on his foot and then hits him with a spray of water from the bottle he’s been using to clean the bar.  “Try it again and I’ll dump a cocktail over your head, Hansen.”

“If you wanted to have a drink with me so bad you could have just asked,” he replies, trying to be blasé about the fact that his foot fucking hurts.

“And then I’ll take the cost out of your paycheck.”

 

Scott strikes out about as much as he hits home runs, but when he does he takes them back to the shitty flat a few blocks away from the bar and gets them under him, whispers, “Tell me how much you want me, love,” into their ears and goes until they’re babbling it.

 

Angela calls him the third week after Herc leaves and tells him in no uncertain terms that he is to have dinner with her and the baby at least once a week.  “Saturdays,” she suggests.

“But I have to get up early to make nice with God on Sundays,” Scott drawls.

“Saturday night, Hansen,” she says.  “My place. Six.  You can leave at ten.  Bring beer.”

Then she hangs up.

“If Herc hadn’t married you first,” he says to the static on the end of the line.

 

He’s half an hour late to dinner and Angela would look cross if she had that capability with Charlie slung over her shoulder.  He lifts his hands to his shoulders as if she’s pointing a gun at him instead of a two-month-old child.  “Got caught up at work.”

Which is a lie, but whatever, she doesn’t have to know that.

The truth is, he wants her expectations lowered.

“No,” she tells him, “You didn’t.  I called Laurie.” She purses her lips and shifts Charlie to her other shoulder, expression no longer irritated.  “I want us to be family proper, Scott.  Quit dodging.”

 _Family_ is vicious words and cheap beer on hot breath and calloused hands never touching, for him.  But he thinks she knows that.  Shrugs, and holds out a six-pack.

 

Sometimes in between wiping down the bar and replacing ice and generally being Laurie’s little gopher, he hustles pool.  He’s shite at first, but the game turns into an easily-dissected lattice of angles and power soon enough, and the other bloke’s head turns into a game of its own, lulling them into security with a couple of bum games and then smashing them after raising the stakes beyond the losses, missing a few trick shots and then sinking one that he bets on.

Laurie objects until she starts cutting her half.

Still won’t fuck him, though.

 

Sometimes when they figure out he’s playing them they get pissy, but it’s not illegal to fleece the hell out of a man and they’re both equally guilty of gambling, so usually they leave without incident.  The first time someone throws a punch, he’s surprised enough that it hits him and he goes down hard, scrambling back up to the sight of the bouncer dragging his assailant out.

The next time a loser takes a shot, he ducks it and comes back swinging, feels the crunch of bone under his fist and comes away with his knuckles bruised and bloody. “It was self-defense,” he insists when Laurie is giving him hell for it.

“Stop fighting in my fucking bar,” she tells him, and whacks him lightly in the back of the head with the cue that broke as his opponent was on his way down.

“C’mon, love.”

“I’ll fucking fire you, Scott, don’t think I won’t.”

 

On Tuesday nights, which are his day off, he lies on the bed alone, smoking, with a bottle of vodka in the hand he’s switching on and off the cigarette and the TV remote in the other.

Maybe that’s fucking sad, but it’s more relaxing than dealing with people.

 

Angela is about the only person who doesn’t seem a little nervous having him hold the baby. Her parents, who are staying the week, do not look pleased about the Scott Hansen they remember from Deniliquin having his hands on their grandson.

“He’s changed,” he hears Angela telling them when he’s coming back down the hall from taking a slash.

If he’s changed, he guesses he missed it.

 

He starts bringing her weirder and weirder beers to see when her stopping point is. She goes through chocolate milk stout and some bizarre fucking oyster thing and _oatmeal_ , but the day he brings over some shitty Dogfish Head that’s supposed to taste like wine that he ordered online from the States, she walks past him to reopen the door. “That’s unnatural. Get out of my house, Scott Hansen.”

 

There’s a look in a man’s eyes before he starts hitting, Scott learns, and sometimes when he sees it, instead of ducking behind the bar, he gives the bloke a smirk and slips through the crowd to the door out back.  When they’re drunk enough or angry enough to follow, he gives them hell.

It’s an advantage now that he and Herc never got beefy when they got in shape, because they underestimate him, tall and thin.

He takes out all those brutal feelings on them, all those times his father wanted to hit him, all those times he wanted to hit someone else but smiled and laughed at them instead. When he starts losing with his fists he picks up anything he can find lying around that he can cause some damage with. The fights are short of necessity and usually end with the other guy staggering away or with him ducking back into the bar before they miss him.

He learns to like having blood on his fists.

 

Herc comes back on leave near Easter, takes one look at Scott smoking on his doorstep and grabs the cigarette, takes a pull on it, and grinds it into the ground with his heel. “Don’t you fucking do that around my son.”

“I’m not around your son,” Scott complains.  “I’m standing outside.”

“Then get your arse inside and around him.  You’re watching him tonight.”

Scott grins and shoves him to the side with the heel of his hand, shaking his head to get his bangs out of his eyes.  “Claiming a piece of your wife for the motherland, huh?”

Herc doesn’t look particularly amused.  “He’ll keep you up all fucking night, just so you know.”

“It’s not like Angie’s gonna get any more sleep with y—”

“Stop talking and go play nice with your damned family.”

Scott stumbles through the door with his brother’s hand on his back.

 

The third night he’s back, Scott’s day off, Herc turns up on his doorstep with what looks like spitup on his shoulder, a five o’clock shadow, and something of a sheepish expression. “Angie told me to go spend some ‘quality time’ with you,” he explains, when Scott looks at him and just raises his eyebrow.  “I’m allowed back in the house at ten.”

They size each other up. Scott grins, puts out his cigarette in the tray by the door, and shrugs on his coat.  “Let’s go shoot some pool.”

He doesn’t go to the place he works, finds some other seedy pub, and tosses his brother a shitty cue. “Try not to lose too fast.”

When he beats his brother he moves onto bigger game, and all Herc does is watch and look like he disapproves. Which is stupid, in Scott’s opinion, because he knows damn well Hercules Hansen is no fucking saint. He got drunk just as often as Scott did when they were in school and probably hit just as many uppity pieces of shit, and if he didn’t have Angie, Scott’s willing to bet he’d be fucking just as often as he does.

This time when the fight starts, it’s on purpose and his brother jumps in after him, using a pool cue like a baseball bat.

The two of them are tossed out into the street panting and bruised and Scott catches a hint of the same feral smile he can feel on his own face creeping across his brother’s.

Angie’s not happy with them when her husband turns up with dark purple marring his cheekbone, but what the hell.

It’s what he does.

 

Herc ships back out and Angela calls him in the middle of the night to say, “The baby is crying and I’m lonely and your brother is a jackass.”

He doesn’t say anything particularly comforting to her, just lets her babble and tunes right the fuck out.

 

“Put my son down before I kill you,” Angela says dangerously to him as he comes around the corner into the kitchen with Charlie teetering on one hand, feet wobbling. He can’t stand proper by himself, but when Scott compensates for his wobbling by moving the hand under him, an elaborate balancing act, he can sort of stand upright.

“Aw, but look. He likes it.”  And yeah, the baby is shrieking with laughter, but it doesn’t stop Angela from glaring at him until he topples the floppy little body into his arms instead.

“Ta,” she says primly.

“You’re no fun,” he tells her.

 

Scott lets go of his apartment the year Herc finally gets his transfer.

Takes whatever he’d put in savings out of the bank and disappears, backpacking across the country because why fucking not?

He leaves Angie a note. It says:

_Not dead._

_Scott_

 

He spends a year sleeping on buses and getting sunburned and sleeping with whores in dirty hostel rooms and getting drunk with strangers and trying party drugs with groups of uni kids in their gap years.

Open country’s the closest he gets to a clear mind without some chemical to help him out.

 

He spends the next year in Adelaide and gets a job as a bartender with fake qualifications from a school he never attended.  It doesn’t matter that he never took the courses, not really.  He knows the drinks like the back of his hand.

It’s a trick of the memory.

 

After that he wonders how many jobs he can get without being qualified.  How many places will check?

In Horsham he manages to commit just enough shitty facts to his head that he can get a job as a park guide.

In Naracoorte he manages to get a trial one Sunday for preaching and even though they run him out on a rail after he demonstrates no ability to actually preach, it’s a fun week.

In Mount Gambier he does screen printing.

In Portland, he follows an actor around with a boom.

In Ballarat he tries his hand at being a croupier.  It’s probably the most qualified he’s ever been for anything he’s done.

In Melbourne he helps scientists and fishermen tag sharks—drags the things up into the boat and holds ‘em as still as he can while they jam the trackers in.  He doesn’t get bitten once, and he stays at it three months longer than the gig in Horsham.

Shepparton ends with him being fired in no uncertain terms and legal repercussion threatened.

He almost calls Angie and Herc in Wagga Wagga, but instead he works a phone sex line.

In Canberra, it doesn’t matter what his job is.  There’s nowhere to go from there but back to Sydney.

 

Herc opens the door and then shuts it in his face.

Angela opens the door and then says, “Damn it, Herc!”

Scott just sits there and waits for them to figure it out.  Eventually, he’s invited in and he spends another night sleeping on the couch before Herc dumps his squirming, five-year-old son on him at 6:00 AM, says, “Get up and take a fucking shower.”

Scott almost asks him if he should be cursing in front of the child, but.

He guesses it’s par for the course, for them.

 

“Hey,” he asks Herc a few months later.  “You and Angie going for round two with the brat?”

“Tried while you were gone,” Herc replies shortly.  “Didn’t go well. Could’ve used you being around then.”

 

Scott looks at the ceiling one day and closes his eyes against the white, draws in a breath and smells cheap beer and cigarettes and for a moment wonders if when Herc looks at him he sees Donovan.

 

Charlie is six years old and already so fucking smart Scott’s pretty sure he’s got to be some sort of baby genius.

He doesn’t remember the way Scott does, though, he’s tested.  Herc’s tested, even.  “May tenth of last year,” he says, and Scott replies,

“Making a shark my bitch.” Charlie just stares at them both, and Herc rolls his eyes.  He doesn’t believe it, but it’s true.  “Red shirt, trunks. Blokes on the boat with me were short and one of ‘em had a ray tat.”

When no one’s around to see him do it, he drops in a baritone counterpoint to his nephew’s seemingly constant singing, because it makes the kid smile.

 

Scott knows he’s not a very good person, and frankly, after his fourth beer, he doesn’t really care.

 

He gets another job bartending, with the same fake certification and the reference from Adelaide. He’s good at it.

He misses the open road sometimes, but what can you do.

He comes over for dinner once a week at Angie’s, still.  Still brings the beer, too, but as they’re getting older, the novelty of cheap, weird beers seems to be wearing off.

 

Life settles into a routine and he fucking hates it.

 

The year he turns twenty-seven he quits his job again and this time backpacks up the coast. He has a cell phone this time, though, so Angie and his brother don’t get pissed again.

It’s not as fun as going inland, but it’s easier.   A girl he’s riding the bus with teaches him to juggle and he fucks her in a hostel room, quietly so their roommates don’t wake up.

He learns how to surf from a bloke he pays in pot that he steals from the stash of the teenage boy of the family who pay him for manual labour with a spot on the couch. Gets kicked out of that house when he fucks the wife and the husband finds out.

Somewhere near the Sunshine Coast someone’s boyfriend catches him in bed with his girlfriend and instead of assuming she’s cheating, assumes it’s a planned threesome. Scott doesn’t disabuse him of the notion because fucking is a hundred times better than getting punched.

He learns how to fly a helicopter from a man a little inland who needs his crops dusted and doesn’t want to do it himself.  As soon as he’s good at it he fucks off.

He learns how to play poker at a smoky nightclub a few towns away and figures out how to cheat at poker four days later.

 

Herc calls him three days after his twenty-eighth birthday, sounding tired.  “Come home, Scott, would you?”

He looks at the phone for a moment and then hangs it up.

He comes home when he’s a few weeks from turning twenty-nine with sun-dark skin and a whole new set of scars and skills to show off.

 

The year he’s twenty-nine Trespasser hits San Francisco and the whole fucking world goes insane, but he’s out with his brother playing poker in a shady bar. The two of them look at the TV and watch with the rest of the world while America screams.

While Herc’s distracted Scott looks at his cards.  Then he does the same with the three other blokes at the table.

They end up in another fight. Scott loses a molar and Herc’s left hand is so scraped up he can barely straighten his fingers, but they win, if it can truly be said that anyone wins a bar fight.

 

Charlie turns eleven and Angela turns thirty-four in the same month.  Scott enlists his brother and his brother’s slightly drunk father-in-law and Angela’s brother for a barbershop quartet style round of _For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow_ at each party. He switches up into a falsetto to take the high part and Charlie giggles and Angela rolls her eyes.

Herc glares at him all the way through both renditions, but he stops glaring when Angela kisses him, laughing.

 

A month after that, Scissure hits.

Herc barely speaks for weeks after she dies.

Scott is not entirely sure that he believes she’s gone.

 

They don’t have a funeral, because her death isn’t confirmed.

Her parents hold a memorial service, but they don’t go.

 

They go into the Academy and Scott flirts with Sasha Kaidonovsky and she steps on his foot so hard he limps for the rest of the night.   He tries his luck with Tamsin Sevier and she tells him in no uncertain terms that she is not and has never been interested in dick, any dick, but especially his dick. After that Herc locks him down by grabbing him by the shoulder every time he looks like he’s going to head in the direction of a woman.

Resentful, Scott sneaks off and has a threesome with a couple of blondes.

Charlie—Chuck, now—catches him sneaking back and he puts a finger to his lips and glances at his brother’s sleeping form.  Chuck hasn’t exactly been quite right since his mother died either, and part of that has given him something of an easy willingness to not tell his father things.

Scott uses that because why wouldn’t he.

 

The first time they drift they have such a bad reaction to it that they almost don’t make a second test. The sensors are off the charts on heart rate and breathing and brain activity, every biological marker off, but both of them just straight-face their way through the debrief, _yeah I’m fine_ and _no why wouldn’t I be_ and _just a little dizzy ma’am_.

The reality is, Scott is barely holding up under having a whole other person full of memories shoved into his head and Herc’s head is whirling with the chaos that Scott is so used to having in his skull.

The reality is they can barely see straight just after that first time and Scott spends a good three hours back in the room on the bathroom floor, shaking and vomiting, able to _feel_ his older brother outside the door with the world’s biggest fucking headache and a bone-deep exhaustion, but they lie well enough that they get another test, and this time it’s not so much of a surprise.  Scott’s already got the memories.  Herc already knows what a fucking mess it is in his little brother’s head.

They’re _better_.

They get the Jaeger the Australian government is building, once it’s built.

 

For all Herc gets along with Stacker Pentecost, Scott gets the vague feeling the man doesn’t really like him, and he doesn’t know why.  At least he understands the Kaidonovskys.  He doesn’t know why he wants to be liked, but he does, and he takes that frustration and all his other frustrations out in the ring with his brother with Chuck watching fascinated from the sidelines.

Herc can take anything he can give and give it straight back.  It’s not like he’s so fucking shabby either, but the fact is that at least Herc got some combat training, even if most of it was on how to fire a gun and fly a plane.  After a few months at the Academy, they about even out in strength—Scott has a little bit of reach on him and Herc has a little bit of speed on him and they’re brutal with each other, blow after blow as fast as they can feasibly make and take them, unwrapped fists meeting unshielded skin when one of them isn’t careful enough, fingers bruised and torso a fucking mess by the next morning.

Herc never once makes him bleed, but still, they’re not the Kaidonovskys, who fight to dance, not to hurt.

They don’t hate each other. But Herc is angry because his wife is dead and Scott is angry because he always has been, and sometimes in the evenings after the fights he can feel across that still-remaining connection that his brother wants to apologize for the bruises and the aggression but he never does and they keep at their routine of fighting in the mornings and licking their bruises alone in the afternoons and not talking in the evenings.

Boys don’t, after all.

 

Shipping back out to Sydney, he sits on the floor of the military plane with Chuck and plays chess and tries not to be a little miffed that he keeps losing to a twelve-year-old. “Let me teach you how to play poker, yeah?” he tries, but Herc glares at him from his seat next to them.

“Do not teach him how to gamble.”

“Oh, c’mon. It’s just a card game.”

Chuck turns his face away from his father, glaring at the floor even though he doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.

Scott catches his eye and grins and teaches him a card trick he learned off a bunch of uni kids when he was twenty-one instead, and feels himself pushing that wedge between father and son just a little further in.

Doesn’t stop, though. Figures that’s Herc’s job.

 

Lucky Seven is the second-fastest of the Mark I’s, but third heaviest, and after Chuck remarks that it’s a miracle she can move at all, let alone like she’s got ‘fucking wings or something’, some enterprising young tech sketches out the winged logo that and the flight crew slaps it on vests.

Scott laughs his arse off and starts wearing it everywhere.

Herc is silent about it, but he does the same damn thing.

A couple of weeks later somebody remembers to get Chuck a hat.

It’s too big for him, but he wears it every time they run a drill.  Sometimes they can see him on the video in the inside of the conn-pod, standing in the LOCCENT tech room staring at Lucky’s massive head with the bill of the hat dropping over his eyes.  Herc’s heart squeezes every time he sees it—Scott can feel it like it’s in his own fucking chest, an actual bone-deep ache that drives him insane—but he never even so much as ruffles the dumb kid’s hair when he gets out of the pod, just goes straight to debrief like the soldier he is.

Scott remembers that from when he was younger, no one ever touching him, so he makes it a point to mess up the kid’s mop of darkening hair whenever possible and clap him on the back and punch him in the shoulder.

It endears him to Chuck, but not his brother.

He doesn’t know what will endear him to his brother.

 

Scott knows exactly how Herc feels about him, thanks to the Drift.  His brother loves him, he knows that, because that’s just what Herc does, he loves his family.  But for damn sure he’s never said it, not to him and not to Chuck for a long time, and rarely even to Angela, because that’s not how they were raised.

And maybe he loves him, but it’s not like he doesn’t know what his flaws are.  Herc thinks he’s unreliable, Scott is inclined to agree. A playboy, certainly. A bit of an idiot, which, under duress, Scott would probably cop to.  Maybe on his way to being a drunk, which—Scott declines to comment on.

 _Just like Donovan_ , Herc’s head whispers to the both of them sometimes.

And Scott—Scott knows that’s a danger.

But he thinks Herc has a little of Donovan in him too, more than he’s willing to admit.

 

They get tattoos that match, that shitty little winged seven the tech drew that’s on their Jaeger and their drivesuits and their jackets now already.

Herc’s is on his shoulderblade, Scott’s is over his ribs.

It hurts like bejesus, but whatever.

They match.

Chuck wants one too, he’s pretty sure, so he pays some K-Sci fuck to go out and figure out how to get a set of temporary ones made.  Then he slips them under the kid’s pillow while he’s not looking and plays innocent.

 

They’re shipped up to the Hong Kong Shatterdome while Horizon Brave gets repaired, for a few weeks, and in those few weeks, a fucking kaiju attacks Victoria Bay.

Their first.

The two of them suit up, lock in, and take it the fuck down, ripping up a long submarine that was in the process of unloading before the alarms sounded and using it like a pool cue in a bar fight.

They replay the sound bytes of Herc yelling, “Let’s beat this thing straight back to hell!” into the microphone while Scott laughs manically in the background on every news station that’s ever existed.

(It’s the most fucking terrified Scott’s ever been in his entire life.  And his brother knows it.  A pat on the back is what Herc gives him when they get out, and they’re both riding the adrenaline high so hard Scott scoops his nephew up by the armpits and spins him around before they’re both herded into the debriefing room.)

 

After that, being a pilot is like being a rock star.

And maybe it goes to Scott’s head a little, and maybe the press takes some unsavoury pictures of him on his knees licking some bird through her panties with his hands splayed low over the backs of her thighs, and maybe he gets really fucking drunk and possibly a little high and wakes up with two girls, neither of whom were the one he was photographed with, but.

He just killed a fucking kaiju.  If he wants his tongue up someone’s snatch he’s damned well going to put it there if she lets him, paps be damned.

 

Tess sends them a letter after that first kill, and it almost gets lost in the fanmail, but as always, she is ever-so-slightly cleverer than they think she will be, and she puts “MOM” in the return address, so it goes straight to their fucking room.

Herc refuses to open it, so Scott does it.

It’s an apology. It’s a promise to do better.

It’s an invitation home for Christmas.

They can’t take that time and Herc doesn’t want to, but Scott does his disappearing act again, for three days.  Catches hell for it later, and Herc nearly tears his head off for the disobedience of orders, but it’s worth it.

 

Their mother looks old. White hair now, wide body on short legs, and Scott hasn’t seen her since he was nineteen.  Twelve, thirteen years.  He drops his go-bag in the room he remembers sleeping in for years, and all of his stuff is still there, clothes on the floor, bed unmade, like no one’s touched it since he left.

The papers on the desk are covered in a thick layer of dust, and they’re all his too, applications he never bothered finishing, with aimless doodles up the sides.

There’s no alcohol in the house.

Tess won’t tell him where Donovan is.

But she smiles at him and he doesn’t remember her having done that before, so he tries helping with dinner and fucks it up horribly and ends up dropping her present in the fire on Christmas morning, but instead of yelling at him, she just says _thank you_ and for all intents and purposes acts like she gives a damn.

 

He gives her a cell phone number before he goes back.

She doesn’t call it.

 

There’s a lot of things he learns about Herc that Herc probably never wanted him to know, through the Drift—things like he’s about as straight as your average racecar track, things like he’s fucking terrified of every spider that’s ever existed, things like sometimes, very occasionally, he wishes he’d picked Angela instead of his prickly son who barely talks to him and spits venom when he does.

Things like he’s oh so fucking disappointed in himself for the way Scott turned out. The way Chuck’s turning out.

 _Ship’s sailed on me_ , Scott wants to tell him.

 

He goes for a run on the beach in the afternoon like he used to when he went up the Gold Coast, dives into the water fully-clothed and lets his waterlogged shorts tease at dragging him under.

 

Herc wakes every morning to an alarm at 0600 and drags him out of bed and into the gym. Chuck, even though he’s not in their room anymore and can’t hear the alarm or Scott’s whining as his brother drags him upstairs, joins them somewhere near the mess hall and trots along at their heels, curling up on the floor against the wall to watch them punch each other until one of them calls quits.

It’s usually Scott, even though Herc won’t listen to him the first three times he taps out, just hauls him back into the ring and says, “C’m’at me again, Scotty.”

 

Their second kill is off the coast of New Zealand, and no one takes kindly to his joke that they should just let him have a go at the sheep-fuckers, least of all their chief tech, who is from Christchurch.

Lucky Seven has seen an upgrade that’s added massive curved carbon steel blades to her forearms and out past her hands, and they use them to painstakingly hack away at the kaiju’s neck, as many blows as they can get in as they’re being repeatedly tackled into the water.

It’s dead before they get through to the spinal column, but Scott is sixteen again and holding a roach trapped against his desk and they keep hacking even though it’s not moving anymore, until the head drops and blue floods the water.

Herc doesn’t look at him after that, so he drowns the vicious kill in enough vodka to drop a horse and a girl with dark hair who sits on his lap in the bar and calls him _Daddy_ in bed.  He’s not really into it, but whatever, it’s sex.

“You want Daddy in you, baby,” he whispers in her ear, “you have t’tell him you want him.”

And she does, rather obligingly. He loves it when they scream it.

 

Herc gets shipped out to help train the kiddies on Kodiak Island, because he volunteers for it, because of course he does, and Scott and Chuck stay behind in Sydney and he probably runs the Shatterdome into the ground in six months but no one really complains.

Not even Herc, when he has to come back and fix it.

 

There are so many pieces of people in Herc’s head the next time they drift that Scott can barely take it, all those lives crammed sideways into his skull.

Because they don’t leave, do they?  For other people, yeah, but Scott remember every fucking thing that’s _his_ , and all those people’s memories are his now, too.

On March 14, 2001, he spent most of the day smoking out the window and Herc was buying a ring for his girlfriend, but some girl who’d drifted with his brother was being raped in a gym shower room.  On November 20, 2008, he was kissing a hooker in a dim bar and slamming back shots of tequila and Herc was reading a book to his son, but some bloke with an extra finger on each hand was holding his wife’s hand while she gave birth to their child. On May 8, 2003, he’d been at the courthouse, signing the witness line on his brother’s marriage certificate, and Herc had been in the process of getting married, but someone else had been crying at their mother’s funeral.

What he wouldn’t give to forget these things the way Herc can before his brother shoves them into his head.  But he can’t, because they’re all his memories now, too, and Scott Hansen never forgets his memories. Not since he was two.

For weeks he’s nervous in showers and smiles at pregnant women and wants to cry when he sees old ladies who are vaguely familiar to someone who isn’t him.

 

There is no vacation for a Jaeger pilot.  There is no open road. Scott’s head, which he has been keeping from the boredom that brings all the memories crashing in on him, no longer has enough space in it for all of the people he has never been. Herc ships back out to the Academy again the next year and he dreads the return because he doesn’t think he can fucking take it.

He does.

But he’s cracking under the strain.

 

The thing is, Herc’s not really celibate.  Neither’s Scott, of course, but he’s never drifted with anyone he’s fucked, mostly because he’s pretty sure Herc has been carefully keeping him out of any place that would have his fucked-up cluttered brain in somebody else’s head. The fact that Herc _has_ is the problem.

Because yeah, Herc fucks half the fucking cadets he gets into the Drift with him, because Scott was right all along about just how straight-laced the guy really is. The answer is _not very_.

Which is fucking great.

Because Scott gets all those feelings of slamming lust shoved into his head and he thinks they’re messing him up, because he sort of, kind of, wants to fuck his brother. Or be fucked by his brother. Even though, as far as he knows, he’s never been into blokes.  And he knows that’s wrong, that they aren’t supposed to, and he’s not going to do anything about it, but he kind of wants it.

And Herc knows.

Scott can’t keep secrets from the Drift.

They don’t talk very much anymore.

Not that they ever did.

 

Chuck looks like Angela. He’s thirteen and looks like Angela and Scott knows exactly how that makes his brother ache.  So he calls Chuck _pretty boy_ to watch his nephew blush and strengthen the resemblance.

It’s insignificant little ways like this he hurts Herc.

 

There’s a common misconception about the Drift amongst people who’ve never been in it, that it fosters love. Not the civilians, they’re not allowed to know shit about the Jaeger program, but the people who work in it.

And it’s not like there’s nothing to back it up.  The Kaidonovskys are with each other constantly, closer than any married couple Scott’s ever known has been.  The Gages are practically one person, so close that if the two of them weren’t the most blatant flirts anyone’s ever seen, the world probably _would_ get suspicious.  But the Drift doesn’t have anything to do with love.  Nothing to do with lust, either.

What the Drift creates in people who are in it is _intimacy_.

There’s nothing more fucking _intimate_ , Scott thinks, than having someone in your fucking head.  And, as much as it does good for some people, he and his brother aren’t the Kaidonovskys.  Aren’t the Gages. Aren’t Tamsin Sevier and Stacker Pentecost, who are practically siblings this many Drifts into their relationship.

Which means that whenever they leave the Drift, Scott has this big, gaping hole in his head where Herc used to be.  It’s an agonizing feeling, like he’s too full and too empty all at once, like there’s fifty different people stuffed into his head but there’s too much space for him in it, too. He needs something to replace that intimacy.

He needs to be _touched_ because that’s the only way he knows how to be intimate.

And he can’t, _he_ _can’t_ ask Herc for that.

 

The thing is, if he _did_ ask, Herc would give it to him. He’s almost certain. Because Scott’s his brother.   Because of that word, _his_. Because he used to ask himself what Herc was willing to do for the people who are _his_ , and the answer is everything.

But he doesn’t ask. Because maybe he’s fucked up, but he’s not fucked up enough to think Herc would _want_ it.

He’d _do_ it, though.  And Scott has no interest in being someone’s _duty_.

 

Chuck, who is fourteen, looks at his father sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking like Herc is the culmination of everything good and bad and in between and Scott recognizes that look he always gets on his face after that because he’s seen it in the mirror.

If he were a slightly crueler man or a slightly kinder one, he’d get down on his knees and put his hands on Chuck’s shoulders and tell him, _There’s no fucking point in trying to make him proud.  He won’t fucking notice you_.

It’s not that Herc’s a bad man.

He’s just not really anyone’s family anymore.

Scott’s not sure he knows how to be.

Not sure he ever knew.

 

Herc is the only pilot in the corps who’s tested every Mark they’ve come out with so far, and Scott’s been there with him for some of them, but mostly the reason they use his brother is that he, like Pentecost, can drift with damned near anybody.

So he does. Keeps giving the rookies the taste of the drift.

And Scott gets all those extra lives off him, gets them shoved edgewise into his head, and doesn’t complain because after all, can’t a man take it?

It’s driving him insane. He can feel himself falling to pieces. And the only person who knows just keeps running tests, keeps doing his duty, the same way he expects Scott to.

The problem is, Herc is stronger and Scott’s head gets more and more crowded every Drift.

It’s a funhouse in there and he’s living in it.

Herc just works there part-time.

 

He feels like he did when he was nineteen, except worse, like every day is the same and they all add to the whirlwind taking place inside his skull, and the only time it doesn’t feel like he’s ripping apart at the seams is when they’re killing a kaiju or he’s coming or he’s so drunk he can’t feel his face.

He takes advantage of the Ranger fame and probably fucks half the city, stops caring about what equipment they’ve got going on as long as they don’t mind his dick in them and are willing to beg him for it.

 _Tell me you want me_.

He gets high at a party on something they extract from kaiju liver and it absolutely fucking wrecks him, but it gives him a few hours of peace, just a few hours where everything goes blissfully silent and all he thinks about are the shadows on the walls.

The drug is so fucking expensive, but it doesn’t matter, for him.

When Herc sees him that sky fucking high in the Drift, he waits until they’re out of their drivesuits and showering off the gel before he backs his brother into the wall and snarls, “Don’t you fucking touch that again, Scott.  If we’d gotten a call you would’ve been _useless_.”

Orders. Herc is always giving him orders and he tries, sometimes, to follow them, but mostly there’s no point. He stares his brother in the eyes and glances pointedly downwards, because naked and covered in water and pressed into the wall he wants to get on his knees, and he knows Herc knows it.

Sure enough, his face goes blank and he moves back and Scott knows he’s thinking about it, _would it really be so bad if I just_ and _he wants it would it keep him from acting up_ and he turns his back and washes the shampoo out of his hair and leaves Herc alone in the room with the thoughts he wishes neither of them were having.

Later that night when Herc climbs into the bed across the room Scott says into the dark, “Won’t do it again.”

Through the ghost Drift he can feel the knots in his brother’s stomach loosening.

 

Herc says quietly over the breakfast table, “October 3rd, 1995.”

Scott replies, “Blue checked shirt, dinner at a restaurant, waitress was cute.  Mum’s birthday.”

“Was her birthday, but we didn’t go out,” Herc tells him.  “Donovan got pissed and we stayed in instead.  She whined about it for weeks.”

Now he says it, the memory switches to his own and not some faceless someone else’s. “White shirt,” he says, and his brother shrugs.  Looks at him like there’s something wrong with him.  He wonders, if it’s wrong to remember and wrong to forget, does it fucking matter at all?

 

He smiles and flirts with reporters and makes jokes with the crew, half of whom don’t like him for no discernable reason other than him maybe being a bit of a tit, and plays card games with Chuck some afternoons and lets him thrash his arse at chess some nights.

Nobody knows. Nobody but him and Herc. And that’s how he wants it to stay.

 

There’s a spider crawling up the wall next to his bed, and he cups a hand on the wall next to it, blocking its path until it crawls onto his fingers and runs along them, wonders how his brother can be so disgusted by something so interesting.

 

The night after they kill their third kaiju off the Marshall Islands, a two-Jaeger drop with Horizon Brave, Scott gets so fucking wasted Herc has to drag him back to the hotel. And Chuck’s sitting there, but the second his father enters the room, he leaves.

He’s fourteen and angry and he looks just like Herc at fourteen, only with softer lines and something of Angie’s pretty face in his.

The anger in his eyes is the exact same.

“You wrecked that kid, mate,” Scott slurs, and Herc shoves him hard onto the bed where before he’d been at least trying to take some care with getting his boots off.

“Go to sleep, Scott.”

“D’you know I know just how he feels?”

“No, you don’t. Stop talking about shit you don’t know shit about and sleep.”

“’C’m’ere.”

“ _No_ , Scott.  You’re drunk off your cork, go the fuck to sleep.”

 _That’s not what I want_ , he doesn’t say.  _Just need someone to touch me_.

The shakes he has the next day are attributed to his hangover, not the pressure of the Drift. They ghost strong and he draws on it to stay standing.

 

Chuck ships off to the Academy and Herc pulls his brother into the ring every morning still, bruises him up good and takes his licks himself and half the time by the time it ends Scott wants to get on his knees and beg to stop, but he never does.

 

“Tell him we need a few days,” Scott says in late September when his brother’s leaving the room to get on a conference call with the Marshal.

“What for?”

“Want to visit Mum.”

“I’m not coming.”

“If we get the leave you fucking are.  What was it Angie kept saying about family?”

Herc gets them the leave, three days of it.  The drive from Sydney to home is a long eight hours in a rented car.  They switch off every hour or so, because Scott doesn’t do well sitting still for long periods of time, and they go through Canberra and he shows Herc the hotel where he played cleaning service for a while.

It’s a little bit like open country, but not close enough to get his head set back on his shoulders.

 

Tess throws herself into Herc’s arms at the end of the drive, running towards the two of them and weeping openly and sobbing out her apologies.  “I was such a bad mum,” she says, “I was so young—I didn’t know—I’m so sorry, and now I’ve never met my grandson and my boys are killing kaiju and—”

And she keeps going, but Herc stares at him over her shoulder like he’s trying to beam the question _what the fuck do I do with this_ into his brain.  Scott shrugs and heads into the house, leaves the two of them alone in the yard.

Donovan’s sitting on the couch, with a beer next to him and a cigarette in his hand.  “The prodigal father returns,” Scott jokes, and sits down next to him and nicks a smoke.

Donovan tries to say something, but nothing comes out of his mouth.

So they sit on the couch smoking silently together until Herc finally comes back in, leading a still-weeping Tess and looking criminally awkward.  When he sees Donovan his spine goes straight again and he pulls himself up to his full height, eyes snapping with the sort of teenaged rage they both thought he’d lost years ago.  “Thought you said he was gone, Scotty,” he growls, low, and Scott crosses his legs and nicks the old man’s beer and takes a mouthful of it before he hands it back.

“Guess not,” Scott says casually, waiting for Donovan to say something.

Tess walks over. Sits down on her husband’s skinny knee and looks comically too large to balance there.  Explains, “He doesn’t speak much anymore.”

“How’s your boy,” Donovan says like he’s trying to prove her wrong, and Herc’s jaw hardens, then softens, then hardens again, face cycling through emotions so fast Scott can’t follow them.

“He’s fine. Training to be a pilot.”

“Sorry t’hear about your wife.”

Scott can feel the _no you fucking aren’t_ building hot under Herc’s tongue, so he shoves as much _no_ towards him as he can, and his brother’s eyes flick towards him, then away.

He’s always looking away.

“Long drive,” Herc says. “I’m going to bed.”

Disappears away down the hallway.

 

They run into Angela’s parents doing Tess’ grocery shopping the next day and Herc barely even flinches, just soldiers his way through the world’s most awkward conversation and gets out.

They ask to see pictures of their grandson and Herc doesn’t have any.

He says they’re all in Sydney, but that’s a lie.

There are none.

 

The second they get back to the ‘dome Herc runs off to the Academy to drift with another lot of ranger ready rookies, and Scott takes to drinking himself insensible almost every night because there’s no one to stop him.  A Jaegerfly he fucks up against the back wall of the bar turns out to be a journalist and her photographer gets a picture of him with his trousers at his thighs drilling up into her while her face is buried in his neck, hands clinging to his shoulders and legs wrapped around his waist.

She writes an article about him that makes him sound like an alcoholic whore, and when the PPDC gives him hours of misconduct talks about it, he just shuts up and takes the epithets.

He doesn’t give a damn, and anyway, maybe they’re right.

 

Herc flies back and they do a Drift test and Scott gets the next round of kids packed into him, this time including his nephew, who fills Herc’s head with senseless anger that he can tell it takes weeks for his brother to shake off.  They get drunk together after the test because Scott needs to get drunk and as they’re lying across the room from each other, Herc says, “I don’t know what he fucking wants from me.”

Scott’s too smashed to talk properly, so he can’t say _fucking hug the kid Jesus Christ_ , and it doesn’t matter that he can’t say it because Herc would just think he was messing with him.

Can’t say _tell him you’re proud of him for once in your fucking life_ either, and maybe that’s a good thing, because it hits too close to home.

 

They drop with Gipsy Danger and Horizon Brave in Manila and it’s all they can do to stay in the Drift, because Scott keeps getting sucked back into memories that aren’t his and Herc has to keep them on track and stay engaged with the fight all at once.

They kill the kaiju, but Brave goes down.

The Beckets remind Scott of _them_ for about thirty seconds before Yancy slings his arm around his little brother’s shoulders and ruffles his hair with the other hand and Raleigh laughs, leans into his side and then sticks his tongue into his brother’s ear and runs away while Yancy’s still gaping and he realizes they’re happy.

What he wouldn’t fucking give to know if he were happy or not.

He cycles through so many emotions now minute to minute that it’s difficult to keep up his happy mask, let alone have any idea if it’s the face he would be wearing anyway.

 

He doesn’t remember much of Manila after his fifth drink, but he remembers that familiar, aching peaceful feeling when he wakes up in bed with about six other people, half of whom are naked and the other half of whom are fully fucking clothed, and he figures if he doesn’t remember taking the drug, Herc can’t ding him for it.

So he does it again.

Spends a few hours with some flavour of poison coursing through his veins and something idle in the back of his head sighing in relief.

He never realizes how fucked-up he’s feeling until he kills the buzz in his skull.

 

He does it again three days later.

 

And again, a week after that.

 

Because god, _nothing_ is the sweetest thing he’s ever felt.

 

“January 19th, year you were 22.”

“Sleeping in the bed of an abandoned pickup somewhere out in the middle of fucking nowhere,” he says, and he’s pretty sure this is his, but not positive.  “Shirtless.  You weren’t there, you can’t check.”

“Yeah, nah,” Herc says, and snaps on the front leg pieces of the drivesuit.  “Just wondered what you were doing then.”

 

Herc sees the emptiness in the Drift halfway through the sim fight and dislocates his fucking jaw when he gets out of it, doesn’t even bother to get out of his drivesuit before he’s slamming Scott into the wall, smashing his fist into his face so hard Scott drops, dizzy, as the techs haul his brother off him.

There’s six of them and they can barely hold him back.  “I fucking told you,” he’s saying, “Fucking told you, Scott, you fucking cunt,” and Scott can’t speak, but all he can think is this:

 _You knew. You knew what this was doing to me and it was never important until I tried to fix it_.

 

When they’re questioned about the disturbance Herc squares his shoulders and tells the truth, drops five counts of illegal narcotics use on his head and no one looks surprised and Scott can’t breathe, can’t speak, his face still hurts even though his jaw’s back in line and his heart is beating in his throat.

It feels like betrayal and every thought he has is bitter, _you knew you knew you **knew**_.

Scott Hansen, notorious loose cannon, irresponsible half of the Lucky Seven team, is not a difficult man to imagine with a syringe full of blue.  He’s dismissed summarily, dishonourable discharge for misconduct, and standing there with his tattoo burning a hole through his ribs and his jacket sitting heavy on his shoulders and the words ringing in his ears, he sort of wants to cry.

But _boys don't_.

So he laughs.

Laughs and the second he walks out of there with Herc throws a ferocious hit into his face, which Herc blocks, because they’re Drift compatible, of course he blocks it. Brings his knee up towards his brother’s crotch, and Herc catches that too and throws him across the room, backwards over a chair, and as he’s sitting on the floor panting with his head bleeding sluggishly from a cut on his forehead, he spits, “Shit like this is why your kid doesn’t _love you_.”

Herc’s face goes stony and he sets the chair to rights but doesn’t offer his hand.  “You fucking promised me.  You need to get out of here, now.”

“Oh, yeah,” Scott says, voice rising high and sarcastic as he drags himself to his feet. “Yeah, my perfect brother’s thinking of my fucking health and safety.  Haven’t you fucking done enough?”

“This is fucking you up, Scott.”

“I was _fucked up already_ ,” he snarls, and tears off the stupid Lucky Seven vest so fast it hurts him a little and throws it in his brother’s face. “You didn’t give a tinker’s bloody damn that it was fucking me up until it started affecting _your_ shit.”

“I thought you had a handle on it.”

He’s so calm. He’s so calm.  Scott wants to tear him apart like a kaiju, wants to shred his stupid façade and strip him down to the anger he knows is hiding beneath that poker face. “You spent four years in my head and thought I had a fucking handle on it?  Don’t fucking bullshit me.  More like _you couldn’t handle it_.”

He turns around and walks out of the room.

 

Here’s what Scott Hansen is good at: disappearing.

He disappears.

 

Three months after his dismissal he thinks about going home.

Four months after his dismissal he thinks about going to Sydney.

Five months after his dismissal Herc is piloting with his son.

He doesn’t go home.

He doesn’t go to Sydney.

 _Didn’t take you long to fucking replace me_ , he thinks at his brother’s figure on the television in the bar he’s sitting in the back of.

He wonders if Chuck’s head makes more sense than his did.

 

A year after his dismissal his nephew has made his first kill and he wonders if Herc ever managed to tell the kid he’s proud of him or if the Drift does all that for them.

 

Two years after his dismissal he stops watching the TV.

 

Some days getting out of bed isn’t worth it.  He gets back out on the road again.  When someone says _what direction’re you going mate_ he says _away from Sydney_.

He steals a backpack from a store and gets on a bus.

 

Three years after his dismissal his head is starting to maybe clear a little bit.  It’s better when he sleeps outside.

He does so in any weather, whenever possible.

 

There's a spider crawling on his arm as he lies in the dust by the side of the road.  He thinks maybe it's dangerous and he wonders if it will bite him and he doesn't bother trying to kill it or even shake it off.

Just raises his hand, and lets it crawl onto his fingers.

Watches it make its slow way up the side of his palm and to the tip of his index finger and then, realizing it has nowhere to go, jump off and spin a web back behind it as it floats gently to his chest.

 

He fucks a girl for the first time in years.  With a beard and his sun-beaten skin he’s unrecognizable.  He makes her tell him she wants him and cries into her shoulder when she does even though _boys don’t_ because he doesn’t know why and he can’t stop.

 

Scott doesn’t go by Hansen anymore, because everyone says “Oh, like the _Hansens_!” and he can’t stand it.  After a while, he just stops talking to people unless he has to.

Works on a farm in the middle of nowhere to make money and spends it on beer and tries not to feel like his head is made of sharp edges every time he stays in it long enough to imagine the corners.

He stops everything but the alcohol the fourth year after his dismissal, even the fucking, and when it’s nearing the end of the fifth year he goes off the alcohol, too.

Lets himself go crazy, out in open country where there’s no one to see him talking to the stars.

 

He doesn’t remember most of the fifth year.

 

(He does.)

 

It’s early January of the sixth year when the teenage girl of one of the families that works the farm he’s on now comes screaming up the driveway from school, waving her phone in hand, yelling about the Breach being closed.

Scott doesn’t think he cares anymore.  He thinks he’s lost the ability.

But then as she’s reading out the story to the group of people gathered around her and she says, “Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka were destroyed in the process,” his knees almost fall out from under him.

(Chuck was a fucking kid. Just a dumb fucking kid with Angela Kelly’s freckles and his father’s temper and a chip on his shoulder the size of Russia.

And Herc was his brother. That’s all he needs to say.)

He sits down hard on the ground, and all around him people are doing the same, or they’re hugging each other, or they’re dancing around whooping.

And the ground under his feet is gone.

 

Scott quits his job.

He goes home.

Not to Deniliquin. To Sydney.

He knows by now his brother’s still alive.

And this is where Herc will be able to find him, if he tries.

 

He doesn’t.

 

The ‘dome in Sydney is occupied again, and after a while, he stops expecting to see his brother’s face anywhere but the news.

He catches sight of him on the street once, late at night, and he’s pretty sure Herc’s shitfaced, because he almost moves towards him, and there’s no other explanation for that.

But at the last second he stays on course.

They go in opposite directions.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so btw the condition i'm describing with scott's memory is a real live thing that was originally so rare it was unheard of, called hyperthymesia, which is basically very detailed and accurate biographical recall. i'm a nerd psych major and like to play with how neuroatypicalities affect the drift.
> 
> also, fun facts: the word 'fuck' was used 122 times in this fic


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